[GNU/consensus] Why secushare's new pubsub & multicast API could spell revolution

[carlo von lynX]

Introducing our Multicast Publish/Subscribe API.
    ... taken from http://secushare.org/pubsub *** HTML version has links, in 
particular to https://gnunet.org/design-social-messaging-system                 
                                                                        
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The Subscribe & Publish paradigm, recently nicknamed "pubsub," has been 
essential to Internet technology whenever something was intended for multiple 
recipients. It is an ancient usage pattern in any computer network, but 
currently all scalable solutions depend on a cloud infrastructure and are 
usually owned by a Faceboogle company.

Secure Share intends to provide a scalable publish and subscribe solution for 
the free and GNU Internet. This is probably what most of all sets it apart from 
any other privacy-enhancing project.

=== Pubsub used to do a better job before the web came

Pubsub exists on the Internet at least since mailing lists where invented in 
the early 80's. It's also in the signaling protocols around 1992's IP Multicast 
and in the /join command of 1987's IRC. Or just think of subscribing newsgroups 
in UseNET's NNTP.

The latter was arguably one of the best implementations of the pubsub concept 
to date, because it didn't just model the subscription process - it also 
provided for a standard to efficiently distribute the content to all the 
intended recipients. Nodes of the UseNET news system were organized in a 
multicast tree network with the intention of *minimizing required bandwidth,* 
which happened to be particularly precious prior to the arrival of web commerce.

Many lessons learned before the web were forgotten in the times after. Blogs 
and podcasts have been creating content, but you had to poll their RSS feeds to 
know there's something new. Discussion groups have devolved from newsgroups 
back to mailing lists.

Scalability is such a boring topic, it is usually left for last - and then it 
is too late, when millions of people want to use your product but you can't fix 
it to make it scale. I'm glad that you're still reading.

=== Scalability is proprietary.. or absent.. or you have to roll it yourself

Frequently, in modern designs, scalability isn't even part of the equation. 
Google's PubSubHubbub provides a simple HTTP-based signaling method, completely 
leaving out the distribution aspect – knowing that, should it become popular, 
only a cloud architecture such as Google's would be capable of actually 
providing a functioning and scalable implementation of the protocol. Thus, in 
the current pubsub universe, the Google PubSubHubbub server is the most popular 
one. Surprise.

Similar case with XMPP where the scalability issues are part of the protocol 
design and XEP-0060 just adds a publish/subscribe signaling procedure on top. 
Guess which node is the center of the XMPP universe? Google's. All attempts to 
introduce Multicast into XMPP were rejected by the XSF, ironically because of 
privacy issues. The term was even subjected to mean something else.

Other protocols that implement the pubsub paradigm, but leave the 
implementation of a distribution strategy to the respective software vendor, or 
even the final user, seem to be AMQP, MQTT and ICE. 0MQ has a binding for IP 
Multicast's PGM of which we already know that it either isn't available or it 
doesn't scale - so it is only interesting for deployment in the cloud.

PSYC has been providing a pubsub interface to chat rooms, friendships and other 
subscription channels, garnished with a decentralized multicast strategy, since 
the late 90's. It has been hosting large audience chat events for media 
enterprises.

===== Introducing secushare's Multicast and PubSub API

In the Secure Share project we have chosen to adapt and optimize PSYC's 
approach to the GNUnet architecture, for better independence from the Internet 
as it has come to be. The new API reflects a revamp of the protocol and an 
upcoming new implementation of the pubsub paradigm, which still is a great way 
to model most social interactions on the Internet.

The design is described in Gabor's master thesis, "Design of a Social Messaging 
System Using Stateful Multicast." Current development is going on in the SVN 
repository of GNUnet.

This time we are handing out a publish/subscribe API that actually *works out 
of the user's own computer,* not depending on servers, not exposing interests 
to other people than to the intended ones, and protecting the flow of 
information in transit. Designed to function also in cases of extreme 
popularity such as a pop star's Facebook or Twitter account.

At the same time as the implementation of this fundamental piece of the GNU 
Internet is taking place, we will soon present the equivalent of the 
ActivityStreams protocol, enabling developers to create user interfaces and 
further applications on top of an infrastructure that provides similar social 
functionality as the social services we are familiar with, but in a distributed 
and encrypted fashion.

This could be the foundation of a new free and libre Internet. Wish us luck. 
Or, even better.. participate, contribute.